In general, our clients use this as storage for raw data coming from systems. Our experience is that from the raw data you have to build up the data lake like a data warehouse. It's quite easy to pass from S3, for example, to Redshift. We used the data lake on AWS to store raw data and in some other cases to process advanced analytics. But the main use case here is storing raw data or archiving some data.
I would suggest using the entire ecosystem of AWS for this kind of job. The most important advantage of using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients.
Usually, you define an architecture in which you build up a data platform. The different technologies are different layers of that platform. My advice is to use the AWS technologies altogether. This can give a greater boost to the developer of the data platform.
In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support.
Generally, when you adopt a new technology, you always have to acquire a basket of professional services from the vendor. It's not only for system integrators, but also for clients because they always need some support. In this case, AWS is very expensive.
Something else they could improve is covering the end-to-end of the data platform with AWS products. They have to evolve. They have to improve the tools of data visualization a lot with QuickSight and ETS tool Glue. If they want to provide an end-to-end service with all the technologies to build up a complete data platform they need to improve these two technologies, these two solutions.
I have been using AWS Lake Formation for more or less one year.
We don't have our own projects. We are system integrators so we have projects based on customer requests.
AWS Lake Formation is stable.
AWS Lake Formation seems to be very scalable.
The initial setup is not so complex. There are no issues with deployment.
Also, because of the initial configuration, we usually ask for their support. Probably, for this reason we didn't have any trouble because they were able to do that. This is probably a reason the initial setup was not so complex.
On a scale of one to ten, I would give AWS Lake Formation a nine.
In our experience, this AWS solution is one of the main players now on the market in this field.
Additionally, because they can connect the offer in terms of infrastructure and software, sometimes you can combine the price and discount of infrastructure and software. This could be an advantage for clients.
